Check out the Indigenous Brilliance Podcast Season 2 here

Instagram: @IndigenousBrilliance @RoomMagazine 

– WATCH HERE – Indigenous Brilliance Podcast (Season One): An Animated Celebration

Video Description:

The video starts with a pink background with a white border and blue floral imagery and a title that reads Indigenous Brilliance: An Animated Celebration, Season 1. The video quickly transitions to a fragmented animation of a person’s face with medium-length, black hair: Hailey Bird-Matheson. At 1 minute and 34 seconds, the video transitions to an animation of a person wearing a collared shirt and with short, black hair: Billy-Ray Belcourt. At 2 minutes and 34 seconds, the video transitions to another person’s face, this time with long black hair and floral beaded earrings: Selina Boan. The first and last sentences spoken by each of these people fills the screen with dark pink type type. The pink and white background remains throughout while the blue floral imagery fades in and out throughout each person’s audio. At 3 minutes and 33 seconds, the end credits arrive along with an explanation of Indigenous Brilliance, a land acknowledgement, and thank yous.

Artist Bios: 

Hailey Bird is Nehiyaw (Cree) from Peguis First Nation, Treaty One, on her mother’s side with mixed European ancestry on her father’s side. She was born on Ktunaxa and Sinixt territory in BC’s interior and grew up in Tonkawa territory in central Texas. Hailey came to stolen Coast Salish territory to study social work, swim in the ocean, and hike. As a guest on this land, she tries to be a good relative and support local Nations through activism and learning local languages and creation stories. Hailey’s passion for Indigenous-based research and land-based practices led her to intern at xʷc̓ic̓əsəm (the Indigenous garden at UBC) and engage in practicums supporting people who use substances in the Downtown Eastside. In her free time, you’ll find Hailey beading, drumming, and hanging out with her hedgehog, Henry.

@probablynothailey

Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of four books: This Wound is a World, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, A History of My Brief Body, and A Minor Chorus.

@nakinisowin

Selina Boan is a poet living on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She has been published extensively in literary magazines across Canada, won the Gold National Magazine Award for poetry in 2017, and was shortlisted for the 2016 CBC Poetry Prize. She is currently working on a collection of poems exploring her Cree and European heritage. “Here we go” and “the plot so far” are poems included in this collection and appear in Room’s “Let’s Make Contact” issue 40.4. The love and genuine care that is so evident in Selina’s poems she also puts into the work of the people around her. She champions emerging writers and her friends, and she attends to strengthening community building at every opportunity. Her work is powerful, necessary, and utterly brilliant, and she is very much deserving of Room’s Emerging Writer Award.

@SelinaBoan 

Merissa Victor is a filmmaker, animator and illustrator driven to craft engaging, meaningful stories that connects, inspires change and uplifts. Her work primarily revolves around the subjects of identity, community and place. Merissa is a 2019 Adobe Creativity Scholar and a 2020 graduate of the University of British Columbia’s Media Studies program. Her work in film, animation and illustration has led to collaborations with artists and brands in Malaysia and Canada.